Our long road in struggle for right to roam

It’s the oldest of all outdoor activities but it took a long fight to open up the countryside. David Behrens recounts hiking’s history.

AS LONG as there have been paths, there have been people willing to walk them, and these rarely-seen pictures from the archive are proof, if proof were needed, that hiking holidays are literally as old as the hills.

Only the fashions have changed, with tweed, rather than Lycra, the cloth of choice for taking to the great outdoors.

It was Thomas West, an 18th century Jesuit priest and author, who was credited with popularising the idea of walking for pleasure – particularly in the Lake District. In earlier times, to be seen out walking with no obvious purpose was tantamount to vagrancy.

West published his first guide to the Lakes in 1778. It included a list of viewpoints – which he called stations – from which to enjoy the best views of the water.

Among his followers was his fellow Lakelander William Wordsworth, who walked his way around France, Switzerland and Germany, and recorded the journey in blank verse in The Prelude.

But it was during the industrial revolution that the health benefits of unspoilt countryside became clear to everyone. From the late 19th century, ramblers’ clubs emerged and began campaigning for the “right to roam” on privatelyowned land in the North of England especially, where to hike was to trespass.

The movement was slow to gain traction – if not with walkers then with landowners – and it was not until 1939, seven years after the Ramblers’ Rights movement staged a “mass trespass” on Kinder Scout, in Derbyshire, that the Access to Mountains Act was passed by parliament. Even then it was a compromise, and it took post-war reforms to deliver the promised land to hikers from all walks of life. The latest freedoms, contained in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act, were bestowed as recently as 2000.

PICTURES: FOX PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES. PICTURE: J HARDMAN/FOX PHOTOS/GETTY IMAGES) HANDY MAPS: Two hikers are relieved to have bought the new waterproof Ordnance Survey maps, in July 1933: hikers enjoying a picnic by the Cheddar Gorge in the West Country in May 1934: Mr and Mrs N Smith on a holiday hike in north Devon in June 1931: Four female hikers stop at a road sign in Callander in scenery made famous by Sir Walter Scott, the Trossachs, central Scotland, to check their map. DAMP SPIRITS: A hiking party returning from a climb at Seathwaite in Cumbria’s Lake District, the wettest corner of England, in 1950.

ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES. PICTURE J HARDMAN/FOX PHOTOS/HULTON LURE OF WATER: Ramblers on stepping stones near Rydal in the Lake District, Cumbria, 1957; a group of hikers scale Ben Lomond in Scotland, to gaze down at the loch below in 1936.